Is anyone really doing the Tide Pod Challenge?

“Eating Tide Pods” is, without a doubt, the breakout internet trend of January 2018. The colorful little balls of laundry detergent look so much like candy that it only makes sense to joke about how tempting it is to eat them. But when you push a joke about delicious-looking poison to its limits, you end up with the Tide Pod Challenge.

What is the Tide Pod Challenge?

The Tide Pod Challenge is a terrible trend in which teens dare each other to actually eat laundry soap.

Very few people are actually doing it, but the chance that a kid could take things too far has led YouTube to start removing Tide Pod Challenge videos. Tide itself is treating the Tide Pod memes as a genuine PR crisis, and YouTube is still reeling after Logan Paul, one of its most popular bloggers, filmed a dead body, so the crackdown on Tide Pod Challenge videos has been swift.

YouTube challenges have long been a source of internet moral panic, but kids aren’t as dumb as the media makes them out to be. The challenges that result in serious injury or death, like the “hot water challenge” that scalded one girl’s throat and disfigured two others, typically aren’t the viral hits they’re made out to be. One of the hot water cases, for example, turned out to be a “prank” played on a sleeping girl, not a case of the girl herself copying a YouTube video.

Tide Pod Challenge memes

It’s hard to separate the effect of the videos from the effect of the Tide Pod meme as a whole. There’s no denying that teens are eating laundry pods, but there’s also no denying the meme is the major viral trend of the month. The tension between how delicious the detergent packets look and how dangerous they are to eat is the entire joke. It wouldn’t exactly take a “challenge” to convince teens to try it—it would only take the promise of some of the meme’s social media shine rubbing off on them.

Some of the videos that have been deleted, like one starring 19-year-old Marc Pagan. They came from aspiring YouTube stars doing the stunt to attract views. Pagan has also done a gumball challenge, a rubber band challenge, and a “duct tape waxing challenge.”

But the most popular YouTube videos about the Tide Pod Challenge were those talking about how stupid it is:

“No fuckin’ way I’m gonna bit into a fuckin’ Tide Pod. Are you crazy?” says Jake Iannarino in a video that’s closing in on a million views.

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What can we learn from this? Well, the Tide Pod Challenge isn’t a real teen trend. Sure, it’s viral. Tons of people and media outlets are talking about it. The thing is, they’re overwhelmingly warning against eating Tide Pods. The reaction to the challenge is bigger than the challenge itself ever was.

That’s not to downplay the plight of the 39 teens who ate Tide Pods, a number that can certainly be attributed to meme culture. It is to say, though, that rather than issuing PSAs and blaming meme teens, the best safety measure Tide could implement would be to stop making a product that looks so much like candy that adults with dementia keep eating them by accident.

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